It would be hard to single out just one mistake from the news industry’s fumbled transition to the Internet era. But the most important newspaper publisher in America—Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of the New York Times—says one stumble sticks out among the rest.

“Engineers. That’s what we didn’t focus on fast enough,” Sulzberger says. “The need to have engineers building the systems that we are now using, building the tools that we’re now using.”